MUNCIE – The locker in the corner is empty and it will stay that way. It’s a reminder, not that anyone on this Ball State basketball team needs one. They have memories seared into their brains, memories no college kid should have to carry. Two of them have had tattoos seared into their body, tattoos with the same word as that empty locker at Worthen Arena:

Hollywood.

This season, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. The part about Ball State being good, one of the best teams in the MAC, one of the best mid-majors in the country? Well, that part was always a possibility. The coach arrived in 2013 vowing to rebuild Ball State on a foundation of Indiana high school basketball, and five years later he has a team with eight Indiana All-Stars and nine consecutive wins, the fifth-longest winning streak in the country.

The good? The good has been no surprise.

But the tragedy, nobody saw that coming. Tall young men in black suits, slowly circling a casket. A letter from Connecticut. An empty locker.

Used to be, when the Cardinals came together as a team, they’d huddle around their coach and scream two words: “All in!” That was before Aug. 22, 2017. Now, when they surround their coach and break the huddle, they say one word, and they don’t scream. They say: “Family.”

But when the coach isn’t there, when it’s just the players, they huddle and say another word. It is their heartbreak, and their motivation.

Hollywood.

* * *

When James Whitford got here in 2013, Ball State was a team without a compass. Once a program you didn’t want to play, one that reached the Sweet 16 in 1990 and pulled off the “Wowie in Maui” in 2001 by defeating No. 3 Kansas and No. 4 UCLA on consecutive days, in 2013 Ball State was a place where not enough Indiana kids wanted to play.

That magical 1990 team had four Indiana All-Stars, including NCAA Tournament all-region pick Chandler Thompson of Muncie Central. Another All-Star from Muncie Central, Bonzi Wells in 1994, became Ball State’s all-time scoring leader and best NBA player. And that 2001 “Wowie in Maui” team had four Indiana All-Stars led by Patrick “Petie” Jackson of Delta.

When Whitford arrived, Ball State had zero Indiana All-Stars. The Cardinals had landed just two All-Stars in the previous decade, a decade that saw Ball State wander the wilderness with no NCAA Tournament bids, no NIT bids, and just two seasons above .500.

Whitford reset the compass. A longtime Sean Miller assistant at Xavier and Arizona, whom Miller has called “the most organized, relentless recruiter I’ve been around,” Whitford’s first Ball State recruiting class included Indiana All-Stars Sean Sellers of Greensburg and Jeremie Tyler of Tech. He whiffed on the All-Star down the road at Kokomo, a burly point guard named Tayler Persons who went to Northern Kentucky because Whitford didn’t think he was good enough, but Whitford was the first to offer Tahjai Teague of Pike and landed the 2015 Indiana All-Star. Then he signed 2016 All-Star Kyle Mallers (Carroll) and 2017 All-Star Zach Gunn (Hamilton Southeastern).

Oh, and next season’s Ball State team will be really something. The Cardinals will return their top three scorers (Persons, Mallers and Teague) and add two more former All-Stars redshirting this season after transferring from high-major programs: Missouri’s K.J. Walton (Brownsburg) and Arkansas’ Brachen Hazen (Columbia City).

The centerpiece is the kid from Kokomo, the one Whitford missed in 2014. Three years ago when Northern Kentucky fired its coach and Tayler Persons – the 2015 Atlantic Sun Freshman of the Year – announced his intention to transfer, James Whitford fixed his mistake.

“We’d had a secret scrimmage that year with Northern Kentucky, and (Persons) lit us up,” Whitford says. “I’d been watching him ever since. When his father, Doug, asked me why we didn’t recruit him the first time, I told him the truth: ‘I blew it.’”

Persons became another Indiana All-Star for the Ball State roster.

But it was a kid out of Illinois, a 2016 recruit from Bradley-Bourbonnais High, who would shape this program in ways nobody saw coming.

Zach Hollywood told Whitford, months before his freshman season in 2016-17, that his mom would be at almost all the games. “She’ll be really loud,” Zach told Whitford. “She’ll be that mom.”

She never got that chance. For 20 years Susan Hollywood had managed her ulcerative colitis, but in the summer of 2016 it flared horribly, irrevocably. Zach was in her Chicago hospital room on Aug. 1, 2016, watching her chest rise and fall, when it stopped rising. She was 49.

Zach stayed at Ball State last season, but redshirted. A quiet sort who got along with everybody by shaping his personality around theirs, Hollywood lived in an off-campus apartment with a picture of his mom in a frame that reads: “Those we love can never be more than a memory away.”

The next few days were unspeakable. The team attended Hollywood’s funeral in Bourbonnais and visited with counselors provided by the school.

“Every one of us can tell you exactly where they were when they heard about it,” Whitford says, “exactly what the next 24 hours were like, exactly what going to Zach’s funeral was like.”

After a week Whitford opened the gym for anyone wanting a distraction. Practice began about a month later, then games. Ball State lost its opener at the buzzer, 78-77 at Dayton, and was 1-4 after an early schedule that included losses at Oklahoma, Oregon and Bucknell.

Then came the wins, and they haven’t stopped. It started Nov. 25 at Indiana State, Persons scoring 18, Sellers 14 and Teague 13 in a 93-85 victory, and then defeats of Oakland City and IUPUI. Rolling now, Ball State goes to Notre Dame on Dec. 5 and wins 80-77 on Persons’ 3-pointer with 1.7 seconds left. Four days later Persons does it again, hitting a 3-pointer in the final seconds to beat Valparaiso 71-70 to push the winning streak to five.

“We’re more locked in,” Persons says. “I couldn’t say that for our team last year, but this year … this group is just so together. Everything we’ve been through as a program over the past year has really brought us together. It’s more of a family element. I feel like that’s something that’s hard to match for other teams.”

The locker in the corner remains empty. The wins continue to mount, seven and eight and now nine. The pain remains.

“There are days you go to bed at night, you don’t give a rat’s ass how many games you win,” Whitford was saying Tuesday night in his office, less than an hour after Ball State has rallied to win its MAC opener 72-62 against Eastern Michigan. “This is about trying to help everybody recover. This is about trying to keep our team together. This is about making sure Zach’s family feels respected through the process, gets the questions answered that they want to have answered. If that was my son …”

Whitford stops. He wipes his eyes and reaches into a folder on his desk. He pulls out a white piece of paper.

“It’s just the human element of it,” he says. “What it helps you realize is that: It ain’t that damn important, you know?”

Ball State center Trey Moses had this tattooed to his rib cage in honor of a picture frame featuring the same phrase, a frame where late teammate Zach Hollywood had a photo of his mother: “Those we love can never be more than a memory away.”(Photo: Provided by Ball State University Sports Information)

He’s speaking so softly now, pausing again, wiping his eyes some more. Now he’s acknowledging the paper in his left hand.

“I have a letter here someone wrote me yesterday,” he says. “A high school tennis coach from Connecticut who dealt with it. He said … um … ‘I went over and over our relationship, what did I miss, what could I do differently?’ He said: ‘I have no answer, but to this day I’m a changed person.’

“He’s so right. It was emotionally very, very hard to take to have someone you love take his own life. Being together has brought us close together – that old adage: we only have each other – and made each one of us a better person. I hope so.”

Moses wore No. 41 his first two seasons, but he asked Scott Hollywood for permission to wear his son’s number. Moses wears Zach’s No. 24 now, along with a tattoo on his right middle finger – “241” – a fusion of the friends’ two numbers. Moses, who averages 7.9 points and 7.3 rebounds, has “RIP Hollywood” tattooed on the right side of his rib cage, above another tattoo that reads: “Those we love can never be more than a memory away.”

Persons, the Kokomo star who briefly got away, is a junior now. He leads the team with 14.7 ppg and 4.4 assists, and has beaten Notre Dame and Valpo in the final seconds. In late August he put a tattoo on his right forearm, a bright red Cardinal in flight above a single word.